Chrome 29 Beta: Web Audio and WebRTC in Chrome for Android
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Today’s beta channel release introduces several new Chrome Apps APIs and a few exciting developer features on Chrome for Android. Unless otherwise noted, web platform changes affect desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome for Android.
Web Audio in Chrome for Android
The Web Audio API is a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio. Its goal is to allow web developers to implement professional-quality audio production applications and modern game audio engines. You can see it in action in the MIDI Synth demo, which works on Chrome for desktop, iOS, and, starting with today's Beta, Android (shown below). Note that for this initial release on Android, the feature is only exposed on ARM devices that support NEON optimizations.
WebRTC in Chrome for Android
WebRTC enables real-time communication such as videoconferencing in the browser. It consists of three independent components: getUserMedia, which provides access to the user’s webcam and microphone; PeerConnection, which sets up calls with the ability to traverse NATs and firewalls; and DataChannels, which establishes peer-to-peer data communication between browsers.
These three features have been enabled in desktop Chrome for a while, and today's release adds support in Chrome for Android. Now you can create real-time web experiences that work across device form factors. Watch the Google I/O presentation or call a friend from your browser to see more:
New capabilities for Chrome packaged apps
Today’s Chrome Beta channel brings Chrome packaged apps several new capabilities including richer access to Google services such as Google Analytics, Google APIs and Google Wallet, and better OS integration using services such as Bluetooth and native app communication. Read last week's Chromium Blog post to learn more.
Other web platform features in this release
Posted by Raymond Toy and Wei Jia, Software Engineers and Mobile Media Mavens
Web Audio in Chrome for Android
The Web Audio API is a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio. Its goal is to allow web developers to implement professional-quality audio production applications and modern game audio engines. You can see it in action in the MIDI Synth demo, which works on Chrome for desktop, iOS, and, starting with today's Beta, Android (shown below). Note that for this initial release on Android, the feature is only exposed on ARM devices that support NEON optimizations.
WebRTC in Chrome for Android
WebRTC enables real-time communication such as videoconferencing in the browser. It consists of three independent components: getUserMedia, which provides access to the user’s webcam and microphone; PeerConnection, which sets up calls with the ability to traverse NATs and firewalls; and DataChannels, which establishes peer-to-peer data communication between browsers.
These three features have been enabled in desktop Chrome for a while, and today's release adds support in Chrome for Android. Now you can create real-time web experiences that work across device form factors. Watch the Google I/O presentation or call a friend from your browser to see more:
New capabilities for Chrome packaged apps
Today’s Chrome Beta channel brings Chrome packaged apps several new capabilities including richer access to Google services such as Google Analytics, Google APIs and Google Wallet, and better OS integration using services such as Bluetooth and native app communication. Read last week's Chromium Blog post to learn more.
Other web platform features in this release
- The resolution Media Query allows you to tailor your CSS to specific pixel densities.
- Chrome now supports the VP9 codec for WebM video playback.
- To align with the HTML spec, Chrome no longer allows cross-origin access to the window.history object.
- Chrome for Android now supports the color form input type as well as the min and max attributes for date and time input fields.
- XMLHttpRequest’s timeout property lets you set the number of milliseconds Chrome will wait for a server response. When the it expires, the request triggers a timeout callback.
- We’ve removed support for multipart/x-mixed-replace main resources. We will continue to support multipart images and animated images.
Posted by Raymond Toy and Wei Jia, Software Engineers and Mobile Media Mavens
